All's Fair in Love and Mobility

A tiny fraction, less than 10 percent, of eligible voters in Paris voted Sunday to ban rental electric scooters. Once welcomed with open arms by the citiy's leaders, these conveyances have come to be regarded as both dangerous (responsible for dozens of fatal crashes and hundreds of injuries) and a nuisance and perhaps redundant given the widespread availability of public transit in Paris.

Critics of Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo's nonbinding referendum, which she said she'd treat as binding, have questioned the fairness of the voting process itself. Others have asserted that the decision to ban scooters was unfair to young people and students who predominate among scooter users.

First and foremost, the referendum was a re-assertion of the primacy of the city's - any city's - policy priorities. Mayor Hidalgo has made clear her intentions to improve the quality of life for Parisians by reducing congestion, and noise and air pollution. Transportation categories that came under threat early included diesel-ppowered vehicles, cars of all kinds, and parking.

Hidalgo was not alone in focusing on these priorities. Cities around the world have universally embraced the goals of zero fataltieis, zero emissions, and zero congestion. The challenge has been to meet these objectives in a chaotic transportation environment disrupted by new technologies and VC funded startups with the added roiling fillip of a global pandemic.

Car sharing, ride hailing, and micro-mobility along with public transit all took a severe dive at the outset of the pandemic. Car sharing, ride hailing, and micro-mobility recovered quickly. Public transit did not.

The post-pandemic recovery of micro-mobility imparted a huge stimulous to the sector globally as regulators saw a need to enable two-wheeled transportation options while citizens were turning away from public transit. Today, cities are more concerned with herding their citizens back onto and into public transit. At the same time, the downside of micro-mobility has become clearer from negative interactions with both pedestrians and other vehicles.

The complaints about micro-mobility are flowing into municipalities faster than the regulations governing the sector can be drafter. This intensity of this turn of events - the ebbing of the pandemic and the need to restore public transit - has been exacerbated by the VC-fueled onset of new transportation options.

Ride hail and micro-mobility operators arrived on the scene as guerilla marketers. The ride hail operators recruited their drivers and deployed their apps. The scooter boosters sprinkled cities with their two-wheeled wonders.

What has ensued has become a battle over political influence waged by lobbyists. Those organizations - such as Uber - with the best lobbyists won. Uber has seen in California and elsewhere that leaving their fate in the hands of voters is an expensive 50-50 proposition at best. Scooter operators have nowhere near the political sway or financial resources of ride hailing companies.

The negative vote in Paris is a bad omen for the prospects of wider scooter support. When Mayor Hidalgo first arrived she made clear that her two-wheel preference was for bicycles. (I'd personally welcome a ban on lane-splitting motorcycles on the Peripherique.)

Bicycle providers and public transit are likely to be the big winnders in the wake of the Paris referendum. To survive, scooter operators will have to do a better job of building grass-roots support and political leverage.

The scooter sector has been given a substantial black eye from one of the most strategically important and liberal cities in the world. It's time for scooter operators to pro-actively reach out to their local municipal partners to develop and draft new model regulations that will help preserve and prolong the prospects of electric scooters.